Epitaph

'We started our survivors program armed with good intentions. But they spoke a different language. We spoke a different language. They'd witnessed the inconceivable. Everything we said to them sounded like gibberish. We didn't have a prayer. And neither did they. The program was an unqualified failure. We cut it in thirds, then gave it up completely.'

'And Jean. He was a failure too?'

'Sounds like it, doesn't it. Then again, he didn't shoot himself or throw himself off a bridge, so maybe not.'

Maybe not. Only maybe he did throw himself off a bridge, only maybe it took him fifty-five years to hit the water. But at the very end of his swan dive, this close to oblivion, someone had reached out a hand and said salvation. But who?

'What will you do now?' Dr. Morten asked him. Other than leave my house-which he didn't say but which he didn't have to.

'Poke around a little more. You never know.'

They both sat up, one just a little ahead of the other, though it was hard to say who was first and who was second. Call it a photo finish. Dr. Morten showed him halfway out, pointing the rest of the way like a waiter indicating the direction of the lavatory. William nimbly dodged cats, as nimbly as he could with a cane and arthritis- ravaged legs, which means he stepped on only two or three of them. Dr. Morten wasn't happy about that, and the screaming cats weren't exactly thrilled about it either. All the residents of the town house were pretty happy when he made it out the door.

Then this is what happened.

He walked, okay, limped a block or two. He passed two hot dog vendors who were just setting up.

He passed a black transvestite who asked him if he wanted a date.

A Lexus honked at him as he trudged across a crosswalk, then gunned the engine as he passed, belching out a cloud of rotten egg exhaust. William coughed, limped, coughed, limped. An acorn dropped on his head. A homeless man defecated in front of him. This is what happened. A news truck heaved a bundle of papers to the sidewalk, missing him by inches. Another vagrant yelled at him, cursing him with unbearable rage. A girl with tall bare legs walked right past him without seeing him. He figured out what had happened in Dr. Morten's house. He passed a stray German shepherd, then his limp slowed, became a shuffle, turned into a slight bobbing, eased into stillness. The shepherd barked. This is what happened. What was his name? Dr. Morten had asked him. Jean. Jean Goldblum. And then a cat had leapt across the table, throwing a shadow across Dr. Morten's face. And that was the problem-right there-that shadow. That was the problem. For he could picture it now: the leaping cat, the yellow bowl hurling milk, that shadow-like a still-life now, but one where everything's just off, the perspectives forced, the spatial relationships askew. The problem here was which had come first-the cat's shadow or the cat- and every time he looked at the picture it seemed to be the shadow when it should have been the cat. That was a problem all right, you couldn't account for it, or rather, you could account for it, but in only one way. And that way wasn't the way he was going, he was not going that way. For the only way you could account for that was this: that the shadow didn't belong to the cat at all, but belonged instead to Dr. Morten. That he may have gone to the file, but that he hadn't needed to. That the minute he'd heard that name, he'd known right off who it belonged to, known it so strongly and so immediately that darkness had touched his face like grief.

William had been looking the wrong way. But no longer. The way was that way, the way back.

Santini said every case Jean took was the same case and that the case was his own.

And that case was down in the files.

Now all he had to do was get a look at them.

TWENTY-TWO

Black bag jobs, hit-and-runs, in-and-outs. Santini had been the acknowledged master, Jean the unacknowledged one, and William the class virgin. After all, you didn't have to break in on adulterers when you could peek in on them. Which was just as well, since William, of course, played by the rules, and the rules said private investigators had no more rights than a private citizen and therefore couldn't go breaking into other people's houses. Santini and Jean treated this rule like they treated other people's houses, that is, they broke it, then broke into other people's houses. Santini even had enough time left over to break into other people's wives as well, which means he may have been the real master of the surreptitious entry after all.

William, then, was at a disadvantage. He'd picked up a flashlight at a local hardware store, as well as some black electrical tape, though he would have been at a loss to tell anyone why.

I don't know, Officer, he'd have to say, and unlike the other twenty thousand would-be burglars they'd pick up this week, he'd really mean it.

He whiled away the hours at a Burger King, a street- side flea market, and finally at a movie which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, and which only one hour later he couldn't remember a single word from. Okay, he remembered a few words-the part where they explained native Alabamian Jean-Claude's accent as a residue from his attending summer camp in Switzerland. Drawp your weepon-he said, and this bunch of rednecks refused to, but only because they didn't understand what he'd said. That was William's guess, although they might have been just getting him mad so that Jean-Claude could do his stuff and litter their junkyard with their thoroughly beaten up bodies. William left the theater wishing he knew the martial arts, so he could simply drop-kick his way into Dr. Morten's rose-brick town house.

Which was now precisely one half block from him, and growing increasingly redder as the day faded into evening. Which suddenly reminded him of a certain white dress, that day in East Brooklyn again, her dress, which had turned scarlet before his eyes as he did nothing but watch. Just like that other night outside the Par Central Motel, when he did nothing but watch either. Which meant that when you toted things up, he'd spent a lot of time watching-unlike Jean-Claude, say, who was nothing if not a man of action.

The light was failing quickly and taking whole sections of the street with it. The rose brick turned to brown, then gray, and staining darker by the minute reached a sort of poor man's indigo. If it had been winter, it would have been time, but being summer, the street was still throbbing with urban congestion. People stood around- against cars, on stoops, and on street curbs as if waiting for something to happen. And nothing did, so they sat around some more waiting for something else. Which didn't happen either. In fact, the only thing that actually happened was that William's leg began to ache something fierce, and everyone, but everyone, began to notice him. It might have been his occasional groans of pain that did it-yes, he would say that definitely got people's atten- tion-or it could have been the fact that he was leaning on a cane for hours on end without either sitting down or falling over. Maybe it wasn't hours-but to any casual observer, it would appear that way. Think about it. When they asked-Did anyone notice anyone unusual-everyone would have. It'd be unanimous.

Then, suddenly, deliverance. An ice cream truck rounded the corner a block away, belching out this monotonous jingle which seemed to hypnotize half the crowd into going after it. The other half-the woman in rollers, the two men playing chess across a lopsided bridge table, the man with three dogs-seemed perplexed by this sudden loss of community, and rather than wait for it to reappear, decided to forgo the night air altogether and withdraw en masse. And in the rose-brick town house-now as black and indistinct as rain clouds in a fog, the single light that had been shining brightly from an upstairs window went out abruptly as if snuffed.

Okay, Jean-Claude would definitely take this as the moment to act.

There were two basement windows set beneath the front steps. William had noticed them before; a large tabby had been licking its paws in one of them, staring out with a lazy indifference.

He shuffled over there now. Reaching the bottom of the town house steps, he turned left and stealthily slipped behind them. Translation: He made it there without tripping over his cane. It was cooler here than on the street, danker too, and he could feel moss in the spaces between the bricks. Suddenly, a large grotesque shape appeared in the window. He was this close to scramming, this close, when he realized the large grotesque shape was actually small grotesque him. Or rather, his reflection, staring him down like someone intent on doing him harm. And maybe he was-intent on doing him harm.

Now the reflection wasn't exactly grotesque anymore; more like pathetic. What was he doing? Even his state- of-the-art flashlight couldn't brighten his chances of success. He was out of his element, he was out of his